Announcing Optim Performance Manager Extended Edition 4.1

Today we announced a major enhancement to our performance monitoring and management solution for DB2, with the 4.1 release of Optim Performance Manager for DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows (I’ll use ‘OPM’ in the rest of this blog entry). This is a major new version of OPM that includes a a significantly improved up and running experience and quick problem resolution.

The biggest change you’ll see out of the box is the new Web-based user interface and redesigned problem resolution workflow Our beta customers have given us great feedback in the development and refinement of this interface, and the result seems to be pretty well-received. One of our beta clients states that “The browser interface is easy to use, with intuitive dashboard displays and easy to understand presentation of information.” Even better, since it is Web-based, you can monitor databases anywhere without having to install software on various PCs.

The repository server collects performance metrics from the monitored database and stores them into a DB2 database. You can navigate through the stored data by time and see reports or dashboard data from the chose time period. This allows post-mortem problem detection and resolution, or for proactive monitoring and trend analysis. There are also interactive reports, such as for table space disk growth and for Top n SQL statements, that you can generate from this stored information.

The team has done a lot of work on getting up and running with the monitoring solution must faster. There is an integrated installer and there are predefined monitoring profiles for a variety of workloads, such as BI, OLTP, SAP, QA and Development. I’m really happy with the reports coming from the beta that installation and configuration is “easy.”

Finally, you can launch Optim Query Tuner from several of the dashboards, including the Active SQL and Extended Insight Dashboards, to do in-context query tuning on individual problem queries.

To realize the full power of the new integrations and lifecycle capabilities of this release, you should definitely check out the new package available in this release, called Optim Performance Manager Extended Edition (OPM EE) that builds on the base capabilities in OPM by inclusion of Extended Insight (previously a separately orderable feature), integration with Tivoli monitoring solutions, and configuration tooling for DB2 Workload Manager.

If you like the value of Extended Insight, which provides key metrics and visualizations of SQL as it travels through the software stack for dynamic Java applications, you’ll really like that we’ve extended the capabilities in this release of OPM EE to include CLI applications. We also include out of the box, customizable, workload views for SAP, Cognos, DataStage, and InfoSphere SQL Warehouse help get you going.

To round out our monitoring story to support the strong message we tell with static SQL, OPM EE now includes monitoring support for static SQL from Java applications. So if you want to take advantage of static SQL from Java, either by using the pureQuery API or by using client optimization for any JDBC application, you can get the Extended Insight information that you could previously only get for dynamic.

We’ve also made it possible to import pureQuery application metadata into OPM so that detailed information about the application source (Java package name, method name, line number) can be displayed on the Extended Insight Dashboard for any individual SQL statement. This particular feature will require a pureQuery Runtime license.

Integration with Tivoli monitoring solutions smoothes the handoff between system operators and the detailed database performance analysis performed by DBAs. The integration enables the ability to drill into the deep database diagnostic capabilities of OPM EE directly from the Tivoli Enterprise Portal. One of our beta clients who does extensive work with clients using Tivoli found this integration very useful, and points out that “Outsourced operations will love the Tivoli integration as it allows them to monitor multiple WAS and DB2 instances from a single point of control.”

Finally, OPM EE provides new tooling to significantly ease the configuration of DB2 workload manager. Although the existing WLM configuration tooling is still shipped with InfoSphere SQL Warehouse, this new tooling is integrated into OPM EE. Key monitoring information vital to workload management is presented in context so that you can do related configuration and validation within a single tool

There is really way more than I can possibly cover a blog entry. Here are links where you can find more information and see the user interface in action.